Vitalik 在 ETHChiangmai：迷因浪潮之后，加密货币有什么用？Vitalik in ETHChiangmai: After the Meme Wave, What Is Crypto For?

2 月 3 日，以太坊联合创始人 Vitalik Buterin 在 2026 年 ETH 清迈峰会上与 P2P 基金会创始人 Michel Bauwens 坐下来，就 Web3、加密货币和新的社会协调形式进行了广泛的对话。Vitalik 反思了以太坊最初的愿景，并分享了他对加密货币领域现状的担忧，认为技术进步最终必须服务于更广泛的社会和政治目标。除了技术突破之外，他还质疑加密货币如何应对日益严重的全球信任危机。米歇尔提出了“再生加速主义”的理念，倡导积极支持可持续社会发展的技术，特别是通过将加密货币与真实的生产性经济联系起来。他们共同探讨了去中心化的社会模型、技术在实现全球协作和共享资源中的作用，以及 Web3 在超越猜测走向更深层次的经济和社会转型方面所面临的挑战。音频转录由 GPT 完成，可能包含错误。完整播客请收听：YouTube：https://youtu.be/mPVJ2BZXMGUSpotify：https://open.spotify.com/episode/0iR8UBdwziygmOOZghyPfn?si=X

vVNAD1rQ3iTQF-dTO8OTA 回到起点：Vitalik 重新思考以太坊最初的愿景和加密货币的未来 Michel：几天前，您在推特上表示，以太坊最初的愿景似乎面临压力，也许是时候回归其核心价值观了。你能解释一下是什么促使了这种反思吗？ Vitalik：我总是发现回顾以太坊的早期是很有用的——当时人们对什么感到兴奋，以及他们正在构建的东西，包括所有那些早期的演示和实验。在 2019 年之前，甚至在 2017 年之前，发生了很多真正有趣的工作。人们正在尝试新的金融工具——像 MakerDAO 这样的项目，后来成为现代 DeFi 的基础，而像 Augur 这样的去中心化预测市场等其他项目也开始兴起。

On February 3, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin sat down with Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, at the ETHChiangmai Summit 2026 for a wide-ranging conversation on Web3, crypto, and new forms of social coordination.

Vitalik reflected on Ethereum’s original vision and shared his concerns about the current state of the crypto space, arguing that technological progress must ultimately serve broader social and political goals. Beyond technical breakthroughs, he questioned how crypto can respond to a growing global crisis of trust.

Michel introduced the idea of “regenerative accelerationism,” advocating for technology that actively supports sustainable social development, especially by connecting crypto with the real, productive economy. Together, they explored decentralized social models, the role of technology in enabling global collaboration and shared resources, and the challenges Web3 faces in moving beyond speculation toward deeper economic and social transformation.

The audio transcription is done by GPT and may contain errors. Please listen to the complete podcast:

YouTube：https://youtu.be/mPVJ2BZXMGU

Spotify：https://open.spotify.com/episode/0iR8UBdwziygmOOZghyPfn?si=XvVNAD1rQ3iTQF-dTO8OTA

Back to the Beginning: Vitalik Rethinks Ethereum’s Original Vision and Crypto’s Future

Michel: A few days ago, you tweeted that Ethereum’s original vision seems to be under pressure, and that it might be time to return to its core values. Could you explain what prompted that reflection?

Vitalik: I’ve always found it useful to look back at Ethereum’s early days-what people were excited about back then, and the kinds of things they were building, including all those early demos and experiments.

Before 2019, and even before 2017, there was a lot of genuinely interesting work happening. People were experimenting with new financial tools-projects like MakerDAO, which later became a foundation of modern DeFi, and others like Augur, the decentralized prediction market, were getting started. There was also a lot of work around DAOs. Over time, we’ve come to realize that “decentralized autonomous organization” is something of a misnomer-these organizations aren’t truly autonomous.

Still, the core idea back then was powerful: using on-chain logic to create new forms of governance, and new ways to organize and manage resources. Many people were trying to build more decentralized alternatives across different sectors, whether it was ride-hailing, insurance, or other industries. The shared excitement was about whether digital tools, cryptography, and blockchains could help us organize society-and our relationship with the world and its resources-in more effective and innovative ways.

That spirit, I think, was eventually overwhelmed. First by the rise of DeFi, and then by the broader market frenzy around 2022. While many DeFi projects have survived and delivered real value, we also saw major collapses like Luna and Terra. NFTs that once sold for millions are now down 90% or more. A lot of on-chain games looked fun for a while, but once prices fell and users left, it became clear that most people were there for speculation, not because the games were actually enjoyable.

For me, 2025 was a particularly hard year. We saw some symbolic moments-like Trump launching a memecoin. Once that happened, it felt like there couldn’t possibly be a bigger memecoin than that. In a way, it seemed like the end of the road. Then the Trump memecoin crashed by 95%, forcing people to confront the possibility that this might be the peak-and the collapse-of the entire memecoin phenomenon.

All of this has pushed the crypto space into a kind of collective self-reflection: in today’s world, what role is crypto really supposed to play? Ten years ago, that was an easier question. There were fewer competing frontiers. Today, we have rapid advances in AI, projects like Starship making space travel feel tangible, and major breakthroughs in biotech. If what you’re chasing is simply “impressive technology,” crypto now faces serious competition.

So crypto can’t just exist as a tech flex anymore. It has to stand for something more concrete and meaningful. I think it needs to engage with social-and even political-questions: how do we relate to one another in a world defined by growing mistrust, between countries, within societies, and across institutions? We need to ask whether there’s a future for technology that doesn’t mean abandoning progress, but also doesn’t mean concentrating power even further in places like Silicon Valley, London, or Hangzhou. As a space, we need to clarify what we actually stand for-and then act on it.

From Accelerationism to Regenerative Practice: Ethereum’s Intellectual Roots and What Comes Next for Crypto

Michel: I want to go back to how I remember your origin story. Before Ethereum-or shortly after it launched-you spent some time in Spain and were involved with the Catalan Integral Cooperative. That was a pretty radical left-libertarian, quasi-anarchist social experiment, and in the end it didn’t really work out. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s Bitcoin, which comes out of a much more libertarian, anarcho-capitalist tradition. I’ve always felt that you sit somewhere between these two poles, and that “decentralized accelerationism” is a kind of middle path-almost like a social-democratic compromise, but applied to the digital world.

More recently, Benjamin Life introduced the idea of “regenerative accelerationism.” As I understand it, early accelerationism was basically nihilistic: the idea was that capitalism is full of contradictions, so you accelerate them until the system collapses and something new can emerge. That’s a deeply nihilistic stance. Decentralized accelerationism, by contrast, feels closer to what you just described-a middle way that doesn’t reject technology, but also doesn’t blindly celebrate runaway acceleration.

On this point, I actually agree with Benjamin. The world really does feel like it’s coming apart-at least the existing global order is. We’re in a dangerous but critical transition period. In that context, maybe we do need to accelerate the development of alternatives, and regenerative accelerationism is an attempt to respond to that reality.

This brings me to my critique of Ethereum. So far, Ethereum-and crypto more broadly-has focused largely on the representation of value. A lot of the work has been about moving digital money around, outside of state control. At its core, it’s still mostly about encoding and transferring monetary value.

I think we need to go one level deeper. In the real world, there are already many people engaged in genuinely regenerative and productive practices-healthier food systems, renewable energy, localized production networks. But up to now, crypto hasn’t been very helpful to them. So my real question is: how do you see this? How could crypto be embedded more deeply into the productive layer of society? I’m not talking about traditional financial investment, but about grassroots communities trying to build better ways of living.

Vitalik: I do think we should be doing a lot more in that direction. Let me turn the question back to you first: can you give some examples-either in crypto or close to it-of projects that come closest to what you’re describing?

Michel: Sure. I’ll share a few examples I’m particularly interested in right now. One is a project called Gaia OS. Its goal is to build a full “commons stack” for creating resources that are jointly owned and jointly managed at a global scale. It’s not just a crypto project in the narrow sense-it’s more like a digital rethinking of property and investment.

You can think of it as a system of fractional ownership: resources are funded through global crowdfunding or crowdlending, then grounded locally, governed by local communities under their own conditions, and recognized through formal legal structures. The team has done a lot of very unglamorous work-they’ve studied the legal systems of around sixty countries to understand how to set up trusts, foundations, and similar institutions. For me, that makes it a very solid and important example.

Another example is a project by Indy Johar called Civilization Options. The core idea is that civilizations don’t usually collapse because they fail, but because they lose their options. The problem today is that as we approach serious climate, energy, and thermodynamic crises, there aren’t simple financial mechanisms to sustain alternative solutions over time.

Take Spain and Portugal, for example, where water scarcity is becoming severe. Some people are returning to medieval water practices-digging channels in the mountains so water stays there instead of rushing down into valleys. Others are building small, decentralized dams. Ecologically, these solutions make sense, but they struggle to attract sustained investment. Without a clear, investable entity, distributed solutions like these are very hard to fund. This project is trying to solve exactly that problem: how to enable distributed investment. Indy is very aware of these systemic risks and the challenges involved.

A third example I really like is Will Ruddick’s work with the Sarafu Network. You might already know it. It started with around a thousand local savings communities-what are often called rotating savings and credit associations. These exist all over the world. My own wife is part of three of them, and they’re very common in places like Thailand.

The basic idea is simple: people save together, and the pooled funds allow members to make larger purchases-like a motorcycle or a fridge-that would otherwise be out of reach. Sarafu asks these communities to put around 20–25% of their savings into a larger shared pool. On top of that, they create a complementary currency, using roughly an eight-times reserve model, and put the whole system on-chain.

As a result, what starts as about one million dollars in community savings can support roughly eight million dollars’ worth of economic activity-and it’s all visible and auditable. Beyond that, they’ve built what they call “commitment pools,” and they’re rolling out a system they refer to as “cosmolocal credits.” These allow community members to pre-commit goods or services, assign value to those commitments, and generate liquidity before production actually happens. You could also describe this as a form of multilateral credit.

What all these projects have in common is that they use technology in very direct ways to support real communities, real production, and real livelihoods. That’s where I’d like to see more attention in crypto-not just accelerating speculation, increasing transaction speed, or focusing solely on privacy. Those things matter too, of course. But if Ethereum is really going to help change the world’s productive logic, I think there’s still a lot of room to go deeper.

When Capital Meets Reality: The Gap Between Web3 and the Productive Economy

Vitalik: One thing I’ve noticed is how hard it is to get people to engage with mechanisms they’re not already familiar with. On Ethereum, for example, we’ve seen all kinds of experiments-things like “hamburger tax” NFTs or assets with complex conditions attached. But again and again, you run into the same problem: people default to what they already know. They stick with ERC20s because they’re familiar. Even within ERC20s, it’s hard to get interest in assets that aren’t basically dollars.

Take something like RAI, for instance. It’s almost dollar-pegged, with maybe a few percent of fluctuation per year-and even that struggles to attract attention.

My guess is that some on-chain ROSCAs-rotating savings and credit associations-or similar ideas might work much better in places like Thailand or the Global South, where people are already used to these structures. Which raises a bigger question: do we actually need different designs for different regions? Do we need more people in crypto to really understand the systems that already exist in different communities, and then build tools that fit those realities-instead of saying, “Here’s something totally new we just invented”?

Michel: I’d like to add something here, because I think that’s a very important point. One of my broader critiques-this isn’t just about Ethereum, but also about NGOs and grant funding in general-is how money gets allocated. When funding is distributed through competitive processes with predefined conditions, it almost automatically attracts a certain type of creative actor.

In Web3, this dynamic is even more pronounced. I’ve been to many conferences where it’s mostly technologists imagining how to change the world, backed by funding that feels a bit like comments attached to a capital pool. What you just said matters, though, because I hear you pointing to something different: paying attention to what people are already doing, and recognizing that those practices vary widely by region.

So I’d slightly reframe the issue. There are already millions of people engaged in alternative practices. They just tend to be marginalized because they lack access to capital. My hope is that if even a small fraction of the roughly five trillion dollars circulating in crypto were redirected into building regenerative feedback loops, a lot could change. I’m not sure about the timing-but the potential is clearly there.

Ethereum’s Next Phase: Back to the Web3 Vision, Scaling in Practice, and Rethinking the App Layer

Michel: You probably agree we’re living through a transition period-everything feels like it’s accelerating. That connects to what you wrote a few days ago about “recalibrating Ethereum.” So how do you see Ethereum’s role over the next five years? My sense is the next few years will be crucial.

Vitalik: I’d like Ethereum to move closer to the Web3 vision Gavin Wood described about ten years ago: building high-value, high-assurance decentralized applications. The big thing Ethereum is really trying to provide is a kind of shared compute and shared memory layer-so applications can record and verify shared facts. That can be token balances, but it can also be many other kinds of state that matter to a community.

Yes, that’s useful for money-but it’s also useful for representing all kinds of other assets, and even things that ultimately still rely on some community recognition to have meaning. The goal of Ethereum as a blockchain is to offer this functionality at enough scale and convenience that it actually makes sense for people to use.

I think we’re getting closer. With the scalability work happening now, transaction fees for many things are already under one cent, and I expect costs to keep dropping over the next one to three years. Long term, I’d like people to think of Ethereum as a base layer of the decentralized internet-like DNS, communication networks, or email: general-purpose infrastructure that lets different systems get built and interoperate. Over the next decade, I hope Ethereum can steadily become that kind of platform.

But beyond the base layer, there’s a separate-and harder-question: what should we actually build on top of it, and how? The traditional way of building apps is: you run a server, you keep a database. Often it’s not even sophisticated-it’s basically a Google Sheet. It works, but it’s trust-heavy, low on accountability, and doesn’t interoperate well with other systems.

Blockchains are a totally different paradigm. In DeFi, we saw an entire way of thinking emerge organically: composability. Different DeFi projects plug into each other-flash loans, multi-hop transactions that route through several on-chain AMMs in a single transaction. That mindset wasn’t imposed from the top; it grew out of practice. And I think we need something similar for basically everything beyond just money.

We’ve also taken some wrong turns. One big example is DAOs: a lot of the DAO designs we’ve seen so far weren’t optimized for effectiveness-and maybe not even for decentralization. They were often optimized for legal safety under certain regulatory regimes. Legal safety matters, but it’s not the same as building the organizational forms we originally cared about.

Here’s another example: people often tell me they want to put “loyalty points” on-chain. When I ask why, they say it’s to make loyalty points more fungible. But loyalty and fungibility are kind of opposites. If your goal is to keep people engaged inside a specific community-whether it’s a grassroots community or a corporate one-that’s a different goal from breaking down boundaries and making everything easily tradeable and interchangeable. Mixing those goals leads to confused design.

So I think we need to think much more carefully about the details-what we actually want and why. One definition I sometimes use for “finance” is: it’s a class of formalized point systems that don’t try to prevent collusion. I’ve written about why I use that framing, and I often compare money to voting systems like Twitter.

On Twitter, likes and retweets are also a point system-you can see the numbers, and getting more feels good. But if people form a like-ring-”I like all your posts, you like all mine”-that’s considered abuse in the context of voting. In money, if I give you a dollar and you give me a euro, that’s not abuse-it’s just foreign exchange.

So if we want to move away from “finance,” we need to be clear about what kinds of interoperability we don’t want-what kinds of interactions should count as corruption or manipulation in a given system.

Overall, I’d like to see much deeper thinking at the application layer-not just “put it on-chain,” but first: what system are we trying to build, what goal is it serving, and what mechanisms actually fit that goal?

From Technology to Civilization: P2P as a New Paradigm for Human Self-Organization

Vitalik: For almost twenty years, I’ve kept seeing your name associated with the P2P Foundation. I’ve always found P2P a fascinating idea, because when people talk about it, they’re usually not just pushing back against state hierarchies, but also questioning hierarchical structures inside corporations.

I remember a talk I once heard at Fudan University where the speaker described the evolution of internet protocols in a very unusual way: from SMTP, to HTTP, to Uber. I found that framing interesting, because it redraws the boundaries of what we mean by “protocols” and even P2P itself. So I’m curious-how do you understand P2P? Not just technically, but economically and socially. And why do you think this idea has evolved the way it has over the past few decades?

Michel: I’ve always felt that from the very beginning-like when Satoshi chose to publish the Bitcoin whitepaper on our site-he probably sensed there was some deeper connection here.

The key difference is that once you have P2P in computing, it naturally extends to P2P between people. So P2P isn’t just a technical system. At the P2P Foundation, we’ve always tried to understand it as a human system.

To me, P2P is essentially a new capacity for humans to self-organize at a global scale. It allows us to create shared projects and organize the production and distribution of value without being in the same place. That’s almost an ethical shift: if I decide to work on a common project with someone on the other side of the planet, I don’t have to pay them, and I don’t have to obey them. That kind of relationship used to exist only in small tribal groups-but now it’s possible at a planetary scale.

Another key aspect of P2P is what I call “stigmatic coordination.” It means we don’t have to rely mainly on market price signals or top-down commands and planning. Instead, in a large, open, global ecosystem, people can choose to contribute their time and labor to shared projects based on signals left by others.

If you look at the history of coordination systems, early tribal societies were basically physical P2P systems, coordinated through gifting, reputation, and commentary. Later, we moved into complex civilizations dominated by markets and state commands. I think we’re now entering a new phase, where stigmatic coordination becomes central again, evolving together with P2P and digital collaboration.

If you ask me what AI is, in one sentence: AI is stigmatic coordination without humans. That’s why I think we’re standing at the edge of a new civilizational system. If you define civilization as the relationship between cities and the countryside, that’s a geographic definition. What we’re building now is a new, non-geographic layer-a kind of “new geography” that isn’t physical.

From that perspective, I see DAOs and the kinds of experiments you’re involved in as people pre-building institutions for the future-laying the groundwork for the next phase of human civilization.

Chiang Mai as a Crossroads: 4seas, Hacker Communities, and the Potential of a Generative Economy

Vitalik: What would you like to see 4seas and the hacker communities in Southeast Asia achieve over the next couple of years?

Michel: Chiang Mai is a very special place. First of all, it’s a real Thai city that grew organically. It’s not an externally constructed experimental city like Zuzalu in Montenegro-which was a great experience, and I’ve been there myself. What makes Chiang Mai unique is that it’s both deeply local and, at the same time, very open to digital nomads and people from all over the world.

A few years ago, I didn’t feel the cultural scene here was particularly vibrant, but that has clearly changed. If you look at it geopolitically, Chiang Mai sits in an extraordinary position. Within a 4,000-kilometer radius, you cover roughly two-thirds of the world’s population-China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia. That’s incredibly rare.

Because of that, I think Chiang Mai has real potential to become an important node in the global transition over the coming years-a genuinely plural center. And that plurality is likely to be shaped more by Eurasian and intra-Asian dynamics than by a traditional Eurocentric perspective. I also think 4seas has played a key role in helping unlock this potential.

If I can add one more thing-this is very personal to me-I believe we need to move from an extractive economy to a generative one. Today, most value is created through extraction: we take resources from nature, let supply and demand set a price, and generate profit. If we’re lucky, some of that value later gets recycled through taxes or donations into restorative efforts. But what if we flipped that logic?

Open-source communities already show us another path: value can be created directly through contribution. Ethereum isn’t valuable because of its price-it’s valuable because thousands of people continuously contribute code, ideas, and time to a shared pool, an open digital commons. That contribution is what later attracts markets and investment. If we can extend this idea of value-through-contribution beyond human systems-and recognize that nature and living ecosystems also create value-then I think we’re touching the core of the transition we’re living through.

Vitalik: I think that makes a lot of sense. It’s a fascinating question, especially when you think about the role Chiang Mai might play in the future. Every time I come here, it’s obvious that the city already sits at the intersection of at least three cultures: Thai culture, Chiang Mai’s own regional identity, and Chinese and Western influences-plus a digital nomad culture that’s now deeply rooted here.

That mix makes Chiang Mai feel genuinely unique and compelling. I’m really curious to see how this kind of crossroads continues to evolve over the next few decades, and what role our communities might play in shaping that future.

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